Madonna Francesca
Intro
- Storyteller: Filomena
- Love is a powerful force, Filomena says. It will even make you consort with the dead.
- She hopes her story will convey the power of Love and the crazy things some lovers will do.
Story
- This story has a beautiful widow named Madonna Francesca as its heroine.
- She has two banished Florentine gentlemen vying for her love. One is called Rinuccio and the other Alessandro.
- They're really annoying in their attentions, and Francesca desperately wants to get rid of them.
- So she gives them a task that she's pretty sure they won't be able to do, and then she can ignore them forever.
- It has the additional charm of being frightening and humiliating for the gentlemen as well.
- Here's the set-up: A disgusting man called Scannadio has died. He was reprehensible total creep and hideously deformed. People who saw him were scared silly.
- Francesca sends her maidservant to Alessandro to say that for some reason, Scannadio has to be exhumed and brought to her home, but that she doesn't want his decomposing body in her house.
- If Alessandro wants favors from Francesca, he'll go to Scannadio's tomb, put on his clothes and pretend to be the dead man.
- He'll have to lie there until her family comes to get him, and Francesca will receive him with open arms.
- If he refuses to do this, she'll never see him again.
- Then Francesca sends the maidservant to Rinuccio's house and has her say that if he'll go to Scannadio's tomb and carry his body to Francesca's house, he'll have what he wants from her.
- Otherwise, he can leave her alone forever, too.
- On his way to the tomb, Alessandro has doubts (i.e. why do Francesca and her kinsmen want the body of Scannadio?) but his lust overcomes his better judgment. As usual.
- Rinuccio's also worrying. He thinks he might get caught with a corpse by the night watch and be charged as a sorcerer. But if he gets his way with Francesca, well, he'll deal.
- Rinuccio almost makes it to Francesca's, but he stumbles onto a sting operation in the neighborhood. The night watch stops him.
- He dumps Alessandro to the ground and runs for his life. Alessandro recovers and also flees.
- Francesca's watching the whole thing from her window and nearly dies of laughter.
- The two men are heartbroken and try to push their luck with Francesca, but she rejects them outright.
- As for Scannadio...his corpse was never found because Alessandro had pushed it out of sight in the tomb.
- Some townsfolk believed that the demons dragged him off for his wickedness.